I still really love my Gateway CX200X; but over time, I'm finding minor little design choices that I just would've done differently if I were designing it.

Today's design flaw isn't news, but it has gotten more and more annoying as I've been watching Star Trek (thank you, Sandy!) on the external monitor. Oh, the Gateway performs quite nicely: at one point I had the DVD running in an external drive, a DVD in the internal drive installing software onto a Virtual PC image, another Virtual PC image downloading service packs from Microsoft (via T-Mobile GPRS cellular modem), and email downloading to the "real" PC via sharing the same GPRS connection; and while the DVD skipped a little here and there, it was watchable. That's an awful lot for one machine to keep up with.

No, my complaint is simply this: whoever designed the external monitor plug for this machine never bothered to include screw holes. So every so often, sometimes right in the most exciting part — the video plug falls out. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!

Now ignore, for the moment, that my machine is in my lap while I'm working, and thus easily jostled. (Red card! No, I don't expect any non-fencers understood that.) But this thing is a Tablet PC. That means it's mobile. Now that may very well have been the reason for no screw holes: it allows a "quick release", so that moving the Tablet PC can't pull over the monitor. But when I give Tablet PC demos, I often pick the machine up, tilt it to show people how it works and how you rotate the screen, etc.; and sure as shootin', that video cord is going to fall out, every single time.

Oh, well. I still think it's a great machine: great development platform, great teaching platform, and great DVD-watching platform.